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Climate Activists Must Organize Like It’s 2099
Though Donald Trump’s Black Friday release of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (FNCA) completely backfired–the media relentlessly covered the report, and with devastating detail–Trump nevertheless managed to escape being held to account for what is (arguably) the Assessment’s most damning observation:
“Current trends in annual greenhouse gas emissions, globally, are consistent with RCP8.5.”
What does this mean?
RCPs, or “Representative Concentration Pathways,” are “possible scenarios” scientists use to “evaluate the implications of different climate outcomes and associated impacts throughout the 21st century,” as the FNCA notes. RCP8.5 is the highest scenario, meaning that it “represents a future where annual greenhouse gas emissions increase significantly throughout the 21st century before leveling off by 2100.”
In other words, RCP8.5 is the worst possible scenario. It describes a world in which the global annual temperature will be, by the end of this century, 9°F higher (or more) than it is today.
We cannot survive such a world.
Trump was not held to account for the FNCA’s claim–or, rather, for what the claim suggests about his pro-fossil fuel environmental policies–because it was widely overlooked in news reports and FNCA “take-aways.” Consequently, when the White House bemoaned the fact that the report was “largely based on the most extreme scenario,” the media, the administration’s critics, and even scientists typically offered the retort that the Assessment addresses other scenarios; that it was properly vetted; and, that RCP8.5 was just one possible future we are facing.
In other words, not one mention of the fact that current trends are consistent with the worst case scenario, trends to which we are contributing significantly.
According to research recently published by the Global Carbon Project, the world “is on pace to release a record 37.1 gigatons of planet-warming emissions in 2018, led in large part by China, the United States and India.” Moreover, our nation’s emissions “are expected to rise 2.5 percent this year.”
The environmental policies of the Trump administration–as well as those championed by many state governments–are nothing less than RCP8.5 in the making. In fact, given that these policies have been formulated in the context of an overwhelming scientific consensus concerning climate change, they are an intentional production of accelerating species extinction, extreme weather, climate migration, climate-related social and economic inequalities, water and food scarcity, sea level rise, ecosystem collapse, climate change related illnesses, disease, and death, ocean dead zones, and polluted air.
They are policies at war with all life on earth.
We could say, then, that RCP8.5 is here and now.
And why not? After all, that “extreme scenario” the White House complained about is not something that will appear suddenly, out of thin air, in the year 2100. No, it will unfold, inexorably, through one deregulation after another, one fossil fuel tax break and subsidy after another, one pro-coal conference and promotion after another, until the water inundates our coastal cities, the pollinators die off, the aquifers dry up, and our food supply runs out.
Of course, even as we are in the process of creating a RCP8.5 world, that world is not inevitable. It is not our fate because we can change course.
But for that to be true, not only must we resist and organize; we must also do both like its 2099.
This article was originally published in Common Dreams.
What tipping point are we waiting for? On heat waves and climate resistance
Every “extreme weather event” that occurs without a powerful, on-the-ground climate activist response is a lost opportunity. In particular, it is a failure to seize the event as a moment to drive home the insanity of our representatives’ inadequate response (or lack thereof) to climate change.
In “Hurricane Mobilizations and ‘the Fierce Urgency’ of Climate Change,” I argued that we should “answer – with orchestrated national mobilizations unsurpassed in growth, force and intensity – the call of every record-breaking hurricane that forms in the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean.”
We should do no less for other extreme weather events, like the recent scorching heat wave that brought record-setting temperatures across the globe, from Siberia to Los Angeles, and that killed 70 people in Quebec alone.
These extreme weather events are telling us, in no uncertain terms, that we are in a state of crisis. We are gradually approaching, and will likely exceed, a 1.5°C increase in global temperatures. In fact, we will likely exceed the 2°C warming limit championed in the Paris Accord. And given the Trump Administration’s commitment to the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels, we will likely pass crucial tipping points that will result in runaway climate change.
Truly, these extreme weather events are calls to radical action.
Why, then, aren’t we overwhelming “our cities, our state capitols, our federal agencies, our Congress, our White House, our corporations, our highways, our railroad tracks, our refineries with increasing waves of marches, canvassing, teach-ins, sit-ins, blockades, strikes, die-ins, occupations” – every single time a record-setting event occurs?
Why just the single march, the grand event, disconnected from the now-regular occasion of a one-hundred year flood, a triple-hurricane, a ravaging wildfire, a 117° day in Los Angeles – all of which, by the way, the press deliriously covers (unlike the grand event)?
Why aren’t we treating the radical nihilism of our climate denying representatives and economic elites with the resistance it deserves?
What tipping point are we waiting for?
(This article originally appeared in Counterpunch).
My new book is out! The Wretched of Mother Earth: The Handbook for Living, Dying, and Nonviolent Revolution in the Midst of Climate Change Catastrophe (2018)
THE “BARBECUE BECKY” ACT OF 2018
Barbecuing while black. Attending a college tour while Mohawk. White people so frequently call the police on people of color who are merely exercising or enjoying their rights that perhaps we need to think of these calls as hate crimes. Clearly, the women and men who are so quick to dial 911 are not only motivated by bigotry; they are also, I would argue, driven by a hateful desire to use police as their proxy both to oppress and to injure – physically, legally, and spiritually – the men, women and children whom they report.
With this in mind, then, I offer below suggested changes (in bold) to California’s “Hate Crime” laws (thank you, Becky). May it inspire the passage of state legislation throughout the country to end this abuse once and for all.
PENAL CODE – PEN
PART 1. OF CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS
TITLE: BARBECUE BECKY ACT OF 2018
CHAPTER 1. Definitions
422.55. For purposes of this title, the following shall apply:
(a) “Hate crime” means a criminal act committed, in whole or in part, because of one or more of the following actual or perceived characteristics of the victim:
(1) Disability.
(2) Gender.
(3) Nationality.
(4) Race or ethnicity.
(5) Religion.
(6) Sexual orientation.
(7) Association with a person or group with one or more of these actual or perceived characteristics.
(b) “Hate crime” includes, but is not limited to, a violation of Section 422.6.
CHAPTER 2. Crimes and Penalties
422.6.
(a) No person, whether or not acting under color of law, shall by force or threat of force, willfully injure, intimidate, interfere with, oppress, or threaten any other person in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him or her by the Constitution or laws of this state or by the Constitution or laws of the United States in whole or in part because of one or more of the actual or perceived characteristics of the victim listed in subdivision (a) of Section 422.55.
(b) No person, whether or not acting under color of law, shall knowingly deface, damage, or destroy the real or personal property of any other person for the purpose of intimidating or interfering with the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to the other person by the Constitution or laws of this state or by the Constitution or laws of the United States, in whole or in part because of one or more of the actual or perceived characteristics of the victim listed in subdivision (a) of Section 422.55.
(c) No person, whether or not acting under color of law, shall report to the police any other person for the purpose of oppressing, intimidating or interfering with the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to the other person by the Constitution or laws of this state or by the Constitution or laws of the United States, in whole or in part because of one or more of the actual or perceived characteristics of the victim listed in subdivision (a) of Section 422.55.*
(d) Any person convicted of violating subdivision (a), (b) or (c) shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not to exceed one year, or by a fine not to exceed five thousand dollars ($5,000), or by both the above imprisonment and fine, and the court shall order the defendant to perform a minimum of community service, not to exceed 400 hours, to be performed over a period not to exceed 350 days, during a time other than his or her hours of employment or school attendance. However, no person may be convicted of violating subdivision (a) based upon speech alone, except upon a showing that the speech itself threatened violence against a specific person or group of persons and that the defendant had the apparent ability to carry out the threat. No person may be convicted of violating subdivision (c) based alone upon a threat to call the police, except upon a showing that the defendant who issued the threat also 1) threatened violence against a specific person or group of persons and that the defendant had the apparent ability to carry out the threat; 2) knowingly defaced, damaged, or destroyed the real or personal property of a specific person or group of persons; and/or 3) previously called the police, is known to have called the police, or has a record of calling police for the reasons described in subdivision (c).
(e) Any person who commits a felony that is a hate crime, or attempts to commit a felony that is a hate crime, and who voluntarily acted in concert with another person, either personally or by aiding and abetting another person, shall receive an additional two, three, or four years in the state prison, at the court’s discretion.
422.86.
(a) It is the public policy of this state that the principal goals of sentencing for hate crimes, are the following:
(1) Punishment for the hate crimes committed.
(2) Crime and violence prevention, including prevention of recidivism and prevention of crimes and violence in prisons and jails.
(3) Prevention of the routine use of police to oppress, intimidate, injure and terrorize the classes of persons listed in subdivision (a) of Section 422.55.
(4) Restorative justice for the immediate victims of the hate crimes and for the classes of persons terrorized by the hate crimes.
(b) The Judicial Council shall develop a rule of court guiding hate crime sentencing to implement the policy in subdivision (a). In developing the rule of court, the council shall consult experts including organizations representing hate crime victims.
*Examples of the violation of this law include, but are not limited to, calling police on a specific person or group of persons (listed in subdivision (a) of Section 422.55) who are merely peaceably engaged in such mundane activities as 1) barbecuing at public parks, 2) attending a college tour, 3) waiting peaceably for friends at a café, 4) napping in a dorm common room, 5) golfing, 6) shopping, and 8) inspecting repairs to a home.
Check out my new book: The Wretched of Mother Earth: The Handbook for Living, Dying, and Nonviolent Revolution in the Midst of Climate Change Catastrophe (2018).
On David S. Buckel and setting ourselves on fire
“The self-burning of Vietnamese Buddhist monks in 1963,” explained the Venerable monk Thich Nhat Hanh in his June 1, 1965 letter to Martin Luther King, Jr., “is somehow difficult for the Western Christian conscience to understand.”
To King’s “Western Christian conscience,” the practice of self-immolation was indeed incomprehensible. Therefore, King “turned to” Thich Nhat Hanh (whom he considered a friend) for help in understanding this practice, which to King appeared to be suicide driven by despair about our nation’s war on Vietnam. “The Press spoke then of suicide,” Hanh continued in his letter, “but in the essence, it is not. It is not even a protest. What the monks said in the letters they left before burning themselves aimed only at alarming, at moving the hearts of the oppressors and at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured then by the Vietnamese. To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance.” Steeped in their Buddhist practices, the nuns and monks who burned themselves thus performed an “act of construction” rather than “an act of destruction,” Hanh wrote, because to die in this way is “to suffer and to die for the sake of one’s people.”
This letter came to my mind when I heard that David S. Buckel had doused himself in gasoline and then set himself on fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park last Saturday. Like the Buddhist monks and nuns about whom Hanh wrote, Buckel, too, wrote letters in which he explained why he self-immolated, letters he sent to the press and to the police. “I am David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide,” he wrote. “Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather. Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels and many die early deaths as a result – my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
Though he fought so ardently in the courts for what seemed, just two decades ago, impossible to achieve–the right of LGBTQ people, like me, to marry–David Buckel looked upon our climate politics and determined that, unlike the case of LGBTQ rights, litigating climate change would not be enough. It would not be enough, that is, to save us from climate catastrophe. Given his choice of protest, Buckel clearly believed as well that nothing we are doing now will save us from catastrophe.
So like the Buddhist nuns and monks of the Vietnam War era (Buckel actually likened his protest to that of Tibetans who self-immolated to protest the Chinese occupation of their country), Buckel set himself on fire. He set himself on fire to alarm us, to awaken us, to move our hearts, and to call our attention to the suffering we are causing because we continue to burn fossil fuels. He set himself on fire so that we would see ourselves, and our planet, on fire.
Yet, Buckel also set himself on fire because he held us in hope–hope that, as witnesses to his death, we would take action that actually reflects the scale of the environmental crisis we are facing. “This is not new,” Buckel said of his protest, “as many have chosen to give a life based on the view that no other action can most meaningfully address the harm they see. Here is a hope that giving a life might bring some attention to the need for expanded actions, and help others give a voice to our home, and Earth is heard. I hope it is an honorable death that might serve others.”
_______________________________
After he explained to King the meaning of the nuns and monks’ self-immolation, Thich Nhat Hanh turned his full attention on King himself. “I am sure that since you have been engaged in one of the hardest struggles for equality and human rights, you are among those who understand fully, and who share with all their hearts, the indescribable suffering of the Vietnamese people. The world’s greatest humanists would not remain silent. You yourself cannot remain silent…You cannot be silent since you have already been in action and you are in action because, in you, God is in action.”
Speaking to his friend, Hanh made clear to King that ultimately what he needed to grapple with was not the fact that the monks and nuns burned themselves. Instead, King needed to come to terms with the fact that he and other well-meaning people looked upon the suffering our government inflicted upon the Vietnamese people and nevertheless remained silent. Though King had been “engaged in one of the hardest struggles for equality and human rights,” he was relatively quiet concerning the war on Vietnam, and so Hanh’s words were a gentle rebuke. Two years would pass before King would finally stand up and, in his own words, “break the betrayal” of his “own silences and…speak from the burnings” of his “own heart” regarding our nation’s war on Vietnam.
And speak he did.
“These are the times for real choices and not false ones,” King declared in his 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam.” “We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.”
David Buckel decided on the protest that best suited his convictions. While we might declare, in spite of Buckel’s explanation, that his act is incomprehensible; and while we might get caught up in debates about whether or not his self-immolation was wrong-headed or dangerous or crazy or ineffective or brilliant, all of that is of no matter. In the end, we have to look at ourselves. We have to attend to our own silences or, rather, our relative quiescence in the face of what we are doing to one another, to other beings, and to our planet–silences that equal death, as Buckel’s burning body proclaimed. Moreover, if we are to survive our own folly–if we are to avoid setting ourselves on fire–then we will need to break, finally and decisively, the betrayal of our own silences. We will need to protest with as much conviction as our climate crisis demands.
This post originally appeared in Counterpunch.
The Wretched of Mother Earth: The Handbook for Living, Dying, and Nonviolent Revolution in the Midst of Climate Change Catastrophe
“Let’s just assume our grandchildren are fucked.”
My new book is out.
Inspired by Sogyal Rinchope’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and Leela Fernandes’ Transforming Feminist Practice, The Wretched of Mother Earth is a mixed-genre Buddhist, feminist, post-colonial, anarchist manifesto about climate change that is also a meditation on dying and death. It is a work in which I argue that if we hope to save ourselves from climate change catastrophe, we must face not only the prospect of human extinction; but also we must radically confront what produced the climate crisis in the first place: the “colonial power matrix” and our deadly attachments to it.
“This [book] is an invitation to experience the transformative power of heartbreak that weaves a healed earth community out of the raw material of grief and fear.” ~Stephanie Van Hook, Metta Center for Nonviolence
Good, bad, or ugly: I invite your reviews of my recent work.
The Wretched of Mother Earth is an ebook that you can order for $4.99 at Amazon (Kindle), Apple (iBooks), Barnes & Noble (NOOK), 24 Symbols, Playster, and Kobo.
Gun massacres and the freedom to tyrannize
“This is the price of freedom,” said former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in reference to Stephen Craig Paddock’s mass shooting in Las Vegas last month. “Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are. The Second Amendment is clear that Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection. Even the loons.”
Every time a gun massacre occurs in this country, opponents of gun control (like Bill O’Reilly) ask us to look beyond the carnage and see instead the very meaning and measure of American freedom. In particular, they insist that we decipher from the bodies not our failure to secure – for all of us – “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”; but instead our triumph over the tyranny of government and despots, as well as security from the threats we face from one another (or, more precisely, threats from the “Other,” usually coded as black and brown).
Thus, after the recent mass shooting by Devin Patrick Kelley in Sutherland, Texas, we were asked again to look beyond the dead and see our liberty. “Lawmakers and pundits on the left,” wrote Justin Haskins of the conservative Heartland Institute, for instance, “have already started to call for increased gun control laws that would strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights in the name of protecting innocent Americans. But, as Benjamin Franklin once rightfully observed, ‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.’”
If the carnage of “innocent Americans” signifies freedom and the “price” we pay for it – or, to put this differently, if we’re supposed to understand Devin Patrick Kelley’s and Stephen Craig Paddock’s purchase, control, and use of firearms as epitomizing American freedom, then it is abundantly clear that what some opponents of gun control want to secure – even at the expense of elementary school children and babies attending church – is neither freedom from tyranny nor protection from others. No, what they want to safeguard, more than anything else, is the freedom to tyrannize or exercise power over, the freedom to be the threat and terror, rather than the ones threatened and terrorized. For what Kelley and Paddock did, after all, was the essence of tyranny.
Perched high above his victims and armed with over forty weapons, Paddock shot at and terrorized vulnerable and defenseless children, women and men who were, of all things, enjoying a country music concert. Paddock killed fifty-eight people and injured hundreds more.
Armed with two handguns and an AR-15 (an assault-style rifle) – as well as outfitted in tactical gear and a ballistic vest – Kelley first shot into Sutherland’s First Baptist Church, where his victims were perhaps singing hymns or praying or reciting Bible verses. And then he went inside the church to continue his assault, killing twenty-six people and injuring twenty.
I think it is safe to say that none of the victims posed a threat to Paddock or Kelley.
All of them, in fact, were defenseless, sitting ducks. To the victims, it must have seemed that Paddock and Kelley were damn near invincible. And by taking their own lives (though the jury is still out about whether Kelley killed himself), both gunmen guaranteed – as tyrants often do – that none of the victims and victims’ families would ever be able to hold them accountable for their crimes.
So when we hear some opponents of gun control condemn gun massacres, ask us to pray, and then talk about freedom, we should be clear that their sentiments are, in reality, celebrations of tyranny and terror, couched in terms of our “essential Liberty.” We should understand that the Paddocks and Kelleys are necessarily, in these gun control opponents’ world view, freedom fighters because they own and use (no matter how horrifically) firearms; and that the dead, maimed and traumatized children, women and men are, for all intents and purposes, fallen soldiers for a just cause (rather than the victims of gun-toting despots) because the person who shot them was exercising his Second Amendment rights. Opponents of gun control would have us believe, in fact, that the dead and injured took a bullet so that we might enjoy living as a free people.
This is all bullshit, of course. And it should come as no surprise that, for gun control opponents like O’Reilly, tyranny is freedom because, for them, tyranny is policy, both foreign and domestic. Tyranny over women, over LGBT communities, over the poor, over black and brown people, over other nations, over the environment, over other species, over people of other faiths – such tyranny constitutes the substance of their health care proposals, tax plans, trade regimes, local bathroom ordinances, court nominations, budget priorities. Tyranny is the point of their greater America.
Consequently, the tyranny exercised by the Paddocks and Kelleys is “not [a] spontaneous” outburst “of raw brutal energy that breaks the chains of civilized customs,” as Slajob Žižek observed (Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors) with regard to the “brutal reaction in males” that “social dislocation” often “provokes.” It is instead “something learned, externally imposed, ritualized: part of the collective symbolic substance of a community.”
Indeed, the tyranny exercised by the Paddocks and Kelleys is precisely what celebrations of freedom as tyranny inevitably produce.
Originally published in Counterpunch.
Climate-change deniers: True Believers who just don’t care
We should dispense once and for all with the term “climate-change deniers.”
Why?
Because “climate-change deniers” keeps us from calling out these women and men – and most especially those who occupy the White House, Congress, and state houses – for performing disbelief about something that, more likely than not, many of them actually accept as true: our climate is changing radically due to human activities.
Most of them, I would wager, believe the science and need us to believe that they don’t. And they need us to believe them, or at least to take seriously the possibility that they honestly disbelieve, not only because they derive benefits from pretending and sowing doubt; but also because the last thing they want is for us to fashion a politics that contends with the frightening truth that even though they know, They Don’t Care.
They don’t care that our glaciers are melting.
They don’t care that sea levels are rising.
They don’t care that the permafrost is thawing and will likely release unsustainable amounts of methane gas into the atmosphere.
They don’t care that our oceans are acidifying.
They don’t care that our water tables are decreasing.
They don’t care that “extreme weather” is becoming the new normal, that resource conflicts due to climate change are turning children, women and men into climate refugees, that species are dying off at an alarming rate.
They don’t care.
And they don’t care that we can actually save ourselves, as well as other beings with whom our lives are inescapably intertwined, from the catastrophes climate change will produce.
This includes the unthinkable catastrophe of human extinction.
They don’t care because caring does not serve their interests.
H.R.673 – To prohibit United States contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Green Climate Fund.
115th Congress (2017-2018)
On January 24, 2017, Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer [R-MO-3] – who has argued that “for far too long, American tax dollars have been sent to the United Nations to produce controversial science and feel-good conferences” – introduced H.R. 673 to the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill expressly forbids “any Federal department or agency” from making contributions to, or for, “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the Green Climate Fund.”
Not only would this legislation undercut both international efforts to assess “the science related to climate change” (IPCC) and the legal framework within which the international community is addressing the climate crisis (UNFCCC); the bill would also significantly weaken efforts both “to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries” and “to help adapt vulnerable societies to the unavoidable impacts of climate change” (GCF).
To introduce such a bill goes beyond disbelief in climate science, for its purpose is to make impossible our capacity both to reach a level of certainty about climate change and its impacts, and to act upon what we discover. It is to silence.
But even more to the point: to introduce such a bill – and to then sign on and make it the law of the land (which this Congress will probably do) – is exactly what you do when you believe in the science and you don’t want the people to know the truth.
Representative Luetkemeyer is a true believer who simply does not care.
Neither do the co-sponsors of his bill. Representative Sam Graves of Missouri, for example, is himself the sponsor of the Stop the EPA Act. Both Jeff Duncan of South Carolina and Paul A. Gosar of Arizona have regularly questioned the science of climate change. The other co-sponsors – representatives Louis Gohmert (R-TX), Walter Jones (R-NC), Ann Wagner (R-MO), Ralph Abraham (R-LA) and Robert Latta (R-OH) – are equally as problematic. None of them score more than 7% on the League of Conservations Voters’ National Environmental Scorecard.
And all of them are recipients of energy sector dollars, the very fact of which should cause us to question their doubts and disbelief – especially since these can be so easily purchased by petro and other energy interests.
If these “climate-change deniers” who populate the halls of government are actually true believers of climate-change science, then we should be clear that the policies they produce and enact in such areas as, for example, health care, civil rights, immigration, labor, international relations, education, and taxes necessarily bear (and will bear) the weight of their nihilistic disregard. After all, men and women who do not care about the looming catastrophes of climate change knowing full well that they are looming, are by and large unlikely to propose health care legislation that is good for us or craft fair labor policies or offer legislation that recognizes the humanity of immigrants. And certainly they will fall short in proposing anything that protects our rights as a free people.
In other words, these faux climate-change deniers can be counted on to pass legislation that expresses their disregard for the vast majority of us.
And even if we take them at their word and suppose that they are true nonbelievers, their inaction concerning (if not indifference to) such phenomenon as sea level rise and melting permafrost suggests a profound lack of concern on their part for what is happening now, before their very eyes. It’s not as if these self-identified nonbelievers are championing mitigation plans or are trying to figure out how to support people increasingly displaced by drought and floods and extreme weather events. If anything, they’re trying to clear the way for more fossil fuel extraction and dependence. This is how nonbelievers operate.
Whether they are believers or nonbelievers is thus really of no matter. In either case, they do not care.
So let’s dispense with the “climate-change deniers” nomenclature. We are up against men and women in power – from corporate board rooms to the White House – who are willing, and happily so, to drive us over the cliff of climate catastrophe. They know that that is where they are driving us while believing, all along the way, in the science that is warning us that we are steadily and dangerously approaching that cliff.
They could really care less.
Climate activism, then – hell, all of our activism – must change accordingly.
UPDATE: Representatives Glen Grothman (R-WI), David Rouzer (R-NC), and Brian Babin (R-TX) have added their names to the list of co-sponsors.
On resistance and marches
These are photos from the 2003 world-wide marches and protests that occurred as the Bush Administration –operating on the lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction – moved inexorably towards its war on Iraq:
On March 20, 2003, the United States started bombing Baghdad.
We marched a little more.
But our government did not stop and has not stopped bombing Iraq (which we do now for different reasons that trace back to the original lie). We will probably continue to bomb Iraq over the next four years.
Like those anti-war marches, our marches yesterday were powerful. We pledged our resistance to Donald Trump, the GOP, the administration that is shaping up, and the policies that they hope to inflict upon us.
Trump and the GOP, however, don’t give a damn about our marches. Like Bush, they intend to bomb anyway – bomb health care, bomb social security, bomb civil liberties, bomb the Treasury, bomb reproductive rights, bomb the poor, bomb immigrants….
In addition to Iraq, they intend to bomb some other country, most likely Middle Eastern.
The only question, then, is what resistance will we offer that will not prove as impotent as our resistance during the Bush years? Will we walk away from these marches, giddy with the delusion that they are the only work that we need to do?
Or have we learned the lesson of Iraq (I have great hopes that we have), which is that the world pays a huge price for – that children, women and men suffer and die because of – our political quietism and submission to those in power, of which our anti-whatever marches have too often been the first phase?
Coming in from the Cold 